For some time now, the back end of Tablet Weaving Draft Designer (TDD) has been a mess. Each new function has been bolted on to it, on top of the previous new function, plus James has not been happy with the .json save file format. He's come up with a way to save drafts as a text based .tdd file that can be viewed by users, rather than the bundle of gibberish you get if you the pop the top off a .json file. You can open your old saved .json files from the previous version of TDD and convert them by saving them in the new format. We have no plan to remove this option to convert .json files, so there's no need to rush to change everything you have saved.
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| The new TDD control panel, showing the arrangement of each of the tool categories |
Additionally, we're made some changes to the interface. The biggest thing is the new control panel. As we added more functions in the old TDD, the control panel has been getting, well, a bit out of control, so we've sorted the functions under headings. To view them, click on the plus sign next to the heading to expand it. You can then hide them again by clicking on the minus sign that replaces the plus sign.
You'll find a few new functions in addition to the old ones. Firstly, you can now tell TDD the name of your draft using the box at the top of the control panel. This will also be the name your .tdd file will be saved as when you save it to your computer. It will also be the name of any image files you export and will appear in the text in the .tdd file. When you export images, you can now specify how large you want them and we've added the option to export as an .svg as well as .png or .jpg. When you click on the button for your desired format from the Export options, it will now download straight away without taking you to another page. Additionally, you can now use Visual Scale to make drafts smaller as well as larger, which will be useful if you're working on a large draft that's bigger than the size of your window, so you can see all of it at once.
The only function that hasn't been carried across is Pattern Repeat, as the way it currently stands, it's possible to use it to simulate bands that wouldn't actually work when woven. It may be coming back in the future, but it currently isn't at the top of our to-do list.
If you come across any bugs, please please PLEASE let us know in the comments here or at catherine.ward+tdd@gmail.com telling us what you did, what TDD did and what you were expecting it to do instead.
